Residents Report Bright Streak Over Bay Area Friday Evening

The Chabot Space and Science Center has received numerous reports of a bright object flying through the sky in over northern California Friday night, as noted by The Washington Post, NBC, and others. According to NBC's version of the story "Chabot astronomers in Oakland said the meteor was not related to the asteroid passing near Earth. Gerald McKeegan, an astronomer at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, said he did not see it, but based on accounts he thinks it was a 'sporadic meteor.' Sporadic meteors bring as much as 15,000 tons of space debris to Earth each year, according to McKeegan. He said it was likely smaller than another meteor that landed in the Bay Area in October, which caused a loud sonic boom as it fell." The eyewitness accounts make it sound pretty spectacular, though; too bad we don't have quite as many dashcams going as there are in Russia.

Re:Just the beginning...

[peragrin]

no no no you got it all wrong. this is the lead fragments of a super massive sized meteor heading our way. You see when it passed through the asteroid belt it pushed a few rocks out in front of it. those are the rocks that are near missing us right now. And since we can't actually see that far into space we can't get together a group of drilling roughnecks and wannabe actors to save us all.

Re:Russian dashcams

[History's Coming To]

Yup. In the UK some insurance companies will offer a discount if you carry an (insurance company installed) dash cam and/or black box recording accelerations etc. In many cases people don't do this because of privacy concerns, but fit their own so they can collect their own evidence in the case of a crash - many insurance claims result in a knock-for-knock judgement where each company pays the other driver's claim because fault can't be determined, resulting in higher premiums/loss of NCD for both parties, but installing your own dash cam can provide enough evidence to save you hundreds or thousands of pounds in the long run.